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I think it's not as much narrative as the explosion of the tech field in general. When i started out tinkering with tech in general in the early 2000s people d

I think it's not as much narrative as the explosion of the tech field in general. When i started out tinkering with tech in general in the early 2000s people drawn to the internet were still mostly a smaller core of passionate forerunners many of whom subscribed to artistic values like simplicity, beauty and the idea of zen. This began to change with web 2.0 circa 2008. Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency. Today tech education is aimed at highly paid and fancy careers for lots of kids with little passion for engineering or designing who never learned to use a desktop because they just had an iPad - they hardly know that you can copy and paste and almost don't know what a website is outside of walled gardens, i kid you not. This year had had the most students ever start in tech related fields, and i know from teaching shortly at university that about 95% have not gone into the field because they love to tinker but because it's highly paid or a "cool career". I know there are still the oldschool "designers and experimenters" out there but it's all about signal to noise. Of course size, complexity, high level modularized abstraction and dependency hell is also an issue, but this probably won't get resolved as 99% of tech people today don't care and don't remember using a computer that didn't have 500ms of latency when closing a window.

dimitrios1 6y ago
I was with you until > Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency. The single most dramatic performance increase I have ever experienced on a computer was with the advent of the SSD. Load times < 2009 when SSDs became mainstream were atrocious.
- bickeringyokel 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by mainstream, but SSDs were still pretty niche in 2009 and traditional hard drives have remained to be pretty popular until recently due to the lower cost.
  - coding123 6y ago
    I bought my first 128gb SSD for like 300 I think in 2008.
  - debian3 6y ago
    My first SSD was in 2008, was 64gb SLC for $1000. Still going strong. But yeah, was pretty niche.
- JaumeGreen 6y ago
  SSD improve programs' loading time, they do nothing for the latency of the UI of those programs. When win95 arrived and brought the desktop as we know it to the masses it brought with it some latency that has not been reduced since. Subjectively it has increased, it might just be my patiece that goes shorter, so YMMV. Yes SSD did bring back some of the lost time, and some more, but the programs don't feel as responsive as in "the old times."

dimitrios1 6y ago

I was with you until > Both my Mac and my Pc from 2005 are way snappier than todays OSX or Win10. Not as fast but has way less latency. The single most dramatic performance increase I have ever experienced on a computer was with the advent of the SSD. Load times < 2009 when SSDs became mainstream were atrocious.

bickeringyokel 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by mainstream, but SSDs were still pretty niche in 2009 and traditional hard drives have remained to be pretty popular until recently due to the lower cost.
- coding123 6y ago
  I bought my first 128gb SSD for like 300 I think in 2008.
- debian3 6y ago
  My first SSD was in 2008, was 64gb SLC for $1000. Still going strong. But yeah, was pretty niche.
JaumeGreen 6y ago
SSD improve programs' loading time, they do nothing for the latency of the UI of those programs. When win95 arrived and brought the desktop as we know it to the masses it brought with it some latency that has not been reduced since. Subjectively it has increased, it might just be my patiece that goes shorter, so YMMV. Yes SSD did bring back some of the lost time, and some more, but the programs don't feel as responsive as in "the old times."